Congratulations to NWPE member Emily Lockhart, 7th-8th grade math teacher at Pocatello Community Charter School. Ms. Lockhart, a two year member of NWPE, received a $500 grant to purchase math games and materials to increase the mathematical fluency of her students. It is this type of support that Ms. Lockhart appreciates about NWPE. “I chose to become an NWPE member because I like the resources available. It makes me feel safer in my job to know that I have legal support if need be. I also like having a voice in educational topics in the political sphere. I was happy to hear that NWPE was an option. The local union has not always been supportive of charter schools and I’m not sure that their decisions are always in my best interest. I’m proud to work at a charter school where families can choose to expose their children to different ways of learning and I think that this choice enhances the Pocatello Community.”

Congratulations to Jennifer Palmer, 11th-12th grade Math teacher a Madison High School in Rexburg, ID. Ms. Palmer was recently presented with a $300 teacher scholarship from Northwest Professional Educators by Brenda Miller, Regional Director for Outreach and Membership in Idaho. Ms. Palmer will use the funds to help pay for her attendance at the July 2015 Intermountain AP Institute in Bountiful, Utah. The conference is College Board approved and is designed to provide teachers with assistance and guidance to teach AP courses. Tips are given for refreshing and improving existing AP courses as well as strategies and activities for teaching course content.

As we all know, the Common Core State Standards reflect a major shift in how we ask students to think about and work with numbers. As reported by Education Week, strategies for how we teacher fractions are changing considerably. While students still need to understand that fractions are a part of a whole, the standards call for us to also teach students that fractions have their own distinct place on the number line and have values as numbers.
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The Mathematics Common Core State Standards start by outlining good mathematical practices that students should develop. The first of these standards says that students should “Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.” Teaching students to make sense of math problems should be second nature, but how do we teach students a skill like persevere?

The What Works Clearinghouse has released a new report on the math practices that we, as educators, should use when instructing young children. For those who do not know, The What Works Clearinghouse is a part of the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. Its goal is to read through the mounds of educational research that are published each year and identify those practices that are research based. So when it prints a report that says this is what we know about teaching children math, teachers, administrators and other curriculum writers should sit up and pay attention.

According to the recently released NAEP scores, or the "Nation's Report Card," reading and mathematics achievement for American 8th graders has improved in the last two years. However, 4th graders' achievement has remained sub par. Overall, there have been gains in both subjects since the assessments in the early 1990s.

Ms. Mary Thompson, a K-8 math teacher for Idaho Distance Education Academy, has received a $200 scholarship award from Northwest Professional Educators (NWPE), the state’s only non-union professional teacher association. Ms. Thompson’s scholarship will fund a course called "Teaching Elementary Math Conceptually" through Northwest Nazarene University this spring. She notes that, “This will help me better teach the parents and students I work with to understand math in a mental, conceptual way and to better transition into the Common Core Standards and new assessments.”

We are proud to announce that Leora White, an NWPE member in Nampa School District, Idaho, has been honored with a $200 NWPE scholarship award to attend and present at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference in Denver, CO, this April. Leora, a math teacher at Lone Star Middle School in Nampa, stated that the conference will help with implementation of the Idaho State Common Core Standards and raise student achievement in areas identified as needing improvement. Mrs. Brenda Miller, an NWPE member representative, awarded the grant at an 8th grade assembly.

With all the misinformation still being circulated and with the assessments for Common Core State Standards (CCSS) right around the corner, I wanted to take a moment to make sure that everyone is aware of the contents of the standards. I’ve done this previously with English/Language Arts, and so today I will attempt to do the same with the Mathematics standards.

As we highlighted recently on the AAE blog, video clips and online resources are changing the face of education, particularly mathematics instruction. While states and districts struggle to keep up with new and emerging technologies, teachers can keep up-to-date with the help of some great online tools.
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Among the many new spending initiatives in President Obama's jobs bill is the flagged 30 billion dollars meant to hire teachers, preserve current jobs, and improve school buildings across the country. While the Senate is expected to debate the controversial legislation this week, the White House is warning that without this federal funding, nearly 280,000 education jobs will be lost this year alone. With rhetoric reaching a boiling point in Washington, the Associated Press is now reporting that President Obama's estimates may be far off the apocalyptic estimates.
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Northwest Professional Educators is proud to award Mr. Jeff Seely, a math teacher at Lynden High School in Lynden, WA, with a classroom grant for $255 to purchase a classroom set of the novel The Housekeeper and the Professor, an engaging novel that contains a good deal of real mathematics. Mr. Seely plans to use the books to capture the imaginations of his students, to broaden their perspectives, and to encourage rich conversations about mathematics.